Failure is the Key to Success

Today was The North Devon Show. It was in Umberleigh, which is only 30 minutes or so from Hallsannery. The weather was expected to be good all day, so we set off about 9am. Traffic was good until we got close and then the last mile or two crawled through the country lanes. Organisation for parking was good, with the adjacent 42 acre field being used; we were quickly directed to where they wanted us parked. At least it was easy to find; we were on the end of a row and under the telephone lines. As we were walking down to the entrance, you could hear where the dog show was.
Just as we got in Jo stumbled on the ground and fell over right by the Red Cross point. After being helped back to her feet, no serious injury had occurred, so we headed off into the show.
We watched the dancing dog show and the kids both joined the show, A seems to have got over her fear of strange dogs. Jo got dragged in as their responsible adult/’dog’ trainer.
On the edge of the Tarka ring, where the dancing dogs had been, we looked at the birds of prey. I correctly identified 2 out of the 3, the Golden Eagle and the Harris Hawk; I got the third one wrong, I thought it might be a merlin, but it was an American Kestrel.

We watched what we could see of the monster trucks, but to be honest we got there too late to get a good view. Well, Jo and I didn’t, the kids made their way to the front and saw it anyway.

Then we had a look at some of the cattle and sheep, before watching a bit of the ferret racing; more hype than excitement in my opinion.

We had Cornish Pasties for lunch, ‘freshly crimped in Cornwall that morning’ and they were delicious.
We looked at the poultry and the crafts tent before seeing some of the show jumping. Unfortunately, the show jumping was on right next to the main area, where the monster trucks were just finishing and kept revving their engines, I don’t know how distracting that must have been for the horses and riders, it was for me.
Somewhere during the day we fitted in ice creams a couple of times and then we headed back to the car. Quite a few cars had already left, so there were gaps all over the place in the carpark. Unfortunately, this meant that cars were driving at random through the parked cars. Although there was a main route out, everybody was trying the jump the queue by driving through the parked cars and joining the queue further up. This had the effect of completely gridlocking the carpark, and so it was a very slow exit. Knowing I wanted to turn right at the exit, I had to force my way into the right hand lane, only to find that both lanes were right turn only; it would have been nice if they had signed that earlier.
We picked up some food in Sainsbury’s on the way back and ate in tonight.